


Sure, you can call me a botanist

by Stardust_and_Strawberries



Series: Out of the fridge [1]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Asgardian Magic, Drug Abuse, Fridge fix, Gen, Graphic Description of Injuries, Magic-Users, References to Norse Religion & Lore, Save Victoria Hand, Threats of Rape/Non-Con
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-02
Updated: 2014-12-02
Packaged: 2018-02-27 21:37:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2707655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stardust_and_Strawberries/pseuds/Stardust_and_Strawberries
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maya Hansen is not quite who she claimed to be. Her secret allowed her to survive being shot and the explosion at the Mandarin's mansion, but will she be able to survive incarceration in SHIELD's Fridge?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sure, you can call me a botanist

**Author's Note:**

> This fic takes place after this [ deleted scene from Iron Man 3, ](http://stardustandstrawberries.tumblr.com/post/103722646092/maya-hansens-death-im3-deleted-scene-im) which I'd really recommend watching because in under two minutes it gives a really important insight into Maya Hansen's character and at least gives her a heroic death if she had to be fridged.
> 
> It came about because [ this post ](http://stardustandstrawberries.tumblr.com/post/100485800952/niobiumao3-maya-hansen-as-a-secret-half-mortal) and [ this post ](http://stardustandstrawberries.tumblr.com/post/100489063432/thefictionfairy-in-the-marvel-cinematic) have been bouncing around in my head for a long time and they finally met, hooked up and had a baby.
> 
> I know the tags make it sound utterly horrific, I promise it's not that bad but I prefer to overtag than surprise someone with triggers.

The battle to breathe, the lances of pain slicing her whole body, told her that she had woken too soon. This was nothing new, her hybrid physiology had never been able to sustain the healing sleep as long as it needed to, but she had never been injured this badly before. She screamed for her herbs, for her mother, for the healing chambers, and they injected her with something that sent her into a second sleep that stupefied rather than regenerated.

 

The second time she woke the pain was bearable. The room she found herself in was silent except for the soft whir of machinery, the air still and stifling. She fought back panic as her magic sought something living and growing and green and found nothing, just herself in a cage of things synthetic and dead. She was desperately thirsty.

 

She pulled herself into a sitting position, noting the constriction in her chest, the new skin on her hands, pink and shiny. Her face felt smooth and tight when she touched it, and for a moment she entertained a desperate hope that the burns had obscured her identity, that she could get out of her before she regenerated enough to be recognizable, resume the life she had built in this realm. But they would have other ways of identifying her wouldn't they, teeth, witnesses, DNA. She gazed fearfully at the camera above the bed. Her head swam and she knew she was still too weak to stand, much less to escape.

 

They brought her water, and later thin broth. They took readings from the machines beside her, looking intrigued.  They took samples of her blood. It seemed useless to protest now, when they could have taken whatever they liked while she was asleep. They didn't try to talk to her. She returned the favor.

 

She slept again, and again. Her shiny skin itched and peeled away, revealing unblemished skin beneath. The bullet wounds left no scars. Her hair began to grow. One day they came with guns bigger than any she'd seen before, even at A.I.M., and escorted her to an interview room where a woman with a streak of red in her dark hair was waiting for her.

 

"Doctor Hansen." A statement, not a question.

 

She had taken her father's name, when she left the realm of her birth (her mother's shame they called her, when they thought she couldn't hear).  Smiling Hans, ancient and grizzled even as her mother's potions held back the years. Not forever of course, he now lay in a barrow long forgotten by his own people, but just for long enough to grant her a memory of him.

 

"And you are?"

 

"Agent Hand. Our medical team judges that you have recovered enough to answer some rather pressing questions we have."

 

"I've recovered certainly. Whether I'll answer depends on the questions."

 

"Let's start with that remarkable recovery of yours. It seems you were shot in the chest then retrieved from the explosion site as what appeared to be a charred corpse. Would you care to explain how you're sitting here in front of me now?"

 

"Not really, no."

 

"I'll be blunt Doctor Hansen. Your DNA is like nothing we have in our files. Given your field of expertise I would imagine you are well placed to explain this fact. If you don't, our science division will find out for themselves in ways you might find inconvenient."

 

It might be a bluff of course she reminded herself, even as her heart leapt with hope, but maybe they really didn't have DNA samples from her mother's people yet. Maybe that lecherous old creep in Seville still hadn't been found out, maybe the younger prince hadn't left any traces during his frankly embarrassing attempt at conquest. (She remembered him from childhood, without affection. He had always been quick to pick on those weaker than himself, hoping to hide his own weakness.) Maybe his older brother had learned some guile by now, otherwise she wouldn't have put it past him to just hand over a sample if asked.

 

Maybe if they didn't know what she was her hybrid heritage would work in her favor for once.

 

"It would be a waste of their time, and I'd imagine your science division will be busy enough analyzing the data I sent Stark on Extremis." A terrible name that. Killian's idea. She had wanted to go with Prometheus. "I'll help you stabilize anyone who's been dosed with it, but I won't help you replicate it."

 

"Unfortunately Stark had been less than forthcoming with the data you sent and the explosion took out AIM's servers." Agent Hand looked tired suddenly. She was being remarkably forthcoming with the gaps in SHIELD's intelligence thought Maya, and for a moment she was tempted to trust her. But no, she realized now that giving Banefire to just one faction of humanity had been a terrible mistake. SHIELD would use it just as AIM had, to replicate the very power disparities she had been trying to redress. She would stay quiet, wait it out. No regime lasted more than a few decades.

 

"Then I can't help you there either." Maya summoned all the icy reserve she had learned as a daughter of a noble house, had perfected over the years of gossip and judgment and mockery, had worn like a suit of armor the day she had left, the day her own mother had offered her the apple and in doing so as close as admitted that she wasn't good enough.

 

"Is there anything you would actually like to tell us Doctor Hansen?"

 

"Yes. If you're going to dye your hair that color at least choose a lipstick that matches."

 

Every interview ended the same way. Eventually they accepted she wouldn't talk and sent her to The Fridge.

 

They let her have a garden at first, until they realized what she could do with it, the esoteric ways in which she could distort the plants' labyrinthine biochemical pathways to produce the acids and explosives that brought her so tantilizingly close to freedom. When they took her garden away she hoarded tomato seeds and orange pips from her meals, accelerated the subtle magic of decay to turn her dinner into rich, crumbly compost. After they found her plants they started giving her vitamin pills, boiled food, nothing with living cells in it.

 

It was this final deprivation that broke her resolve, left her howling for the Watcher to take her home. No answer came, no ribbon of rainbow fire shattered the walls of her cell, and at last she understood; this was to be her punishment for stealing fire from the gods.

 

She began to experiment with her body chemistry then, to take the edge off the boredom. It started with just sleeping a bit more, a pleasant buzz at times, progressed to ecstatic visions that lasted days. She stopped when she realized she had lost two months this way, adjusted her brain receptors accordingly, disgusted with herself. She started reciting poetry to keep her mind occupied, dredging up half remembered sagas from her school days centuries ago, singing fragments of songs of epic battles interspersed with the Motown classics she had discovered mere decades ago. She was sure that some scholar listening to the recordings they must be taking was utterly bewildered. Sometimes she made things up to mess with them.

 

The last day of her imprisonment started like every other. Yoga, shower, the Prose Edda. Breakfast sliding through the meal slot on a plastic tray with plastic cutlery and food that may as well have been plastic itself: oatmeal, dried fruit, heat treated milk, coffee, vitamin tablets, no living cells. Another shower, because what else was there to do? More recitation.

 

An alarm.

 

Reaching out with her mind she felt a shimmer of emotion ripple through the other souls in the prison, the people she could sense but had never seen; surprise, anxiety, anticipation. She waited for what seemed like an eternity listening to the siren wail, feeling the excitement mount, planning possible strategies, and was not startled when a hole was blown through the wall of her cell.

 

"Ladies." a smiling man caught her hand as she reached through, and she stumbled because the taste of his body's chemistry was at once so familiar and so wrong - her own serum, corrupted and perverted with something else so strange, so alien, that it had turned him into something monstrous. He put out his other hand to catch her and she recoiled, twisting away and racing down the corridor, all other thoughts momentarily overwhelmed by the sheer visceral horror of his touch.

 

Out. Away. She had to get away. A wall. A hole. A door. Stairs. The pounding of her heartbeat. Away from the abomination. Her creation. Away. Another door. She kicked it down.

 

Sky.

 

She fell to her knees and vomited. Other prisoners raced past her to freedom. She ignored them, retching onto the sand, trying to expel the memory of his touch. When at last she looked up a man was standing over her, unbuttoning his prison overalls. Most of her fellow captives just wanted to get away as fast as possible. Some though had other needs they wanted to satisfy more urgently after years of solitary confinement.

 

Her kick went through his rib cage and snapped his spine. She may have been no match for a full Asgardian but no human would touch her without permission.

 

The other freed prisoners were making for the docks but she hesitated as something in the water called to her subtler senses. Stumbling first and then running, at last she plunged her hands into a patch of green algae, gasped as she felt the flow of life through it, the deep and complex magics that transformed starlight into food and fire and flesh. Her tears rolled down her face and into the sea, salt water mixing with salt water.

 

An explosion behind her hurled her forward and brought her attention back to the human world. The Fridge's self destruct system had activated, the building toppling in on itself with a sequence of crashes and a cloud of rubble. Watching the controlled collapse she realized she would have to start planning her next moves instead of simply reacting. She would need a new identity, certainly, Maya Hansen would need to be discarded as cleanly as Maaije Iðunnsdottir had been when she left Asgard, but her immediate priorities would have to be shelter and escape.

 

As she contemplated she felt something else, a frantic tugging at the warp of the world's hidden tapestry originating not so far from her. She splashed through the shallows to its source, the corpse of a woman with bullet wounds in her chest, her long hair undulating gently in the waves. Maaije had never completed her initiation as a seiðkonur but she could feel the woman's trapped soul still tethered to her body. She crouched to free her, let her fly to the halls of her ancestors, and froze. The woman's soul was not tethered but was instead clinging to her body with the wild desperation of one whose work on this plane was incomplete, who remained bound to life by desperate purpose even as her hold on her body weakened by the second.

 

Perhaps she could gain some measure of absolution by helping this woman. Never before had she retrieved a soul for whom Hela had thrown open the doors of her halls, but the woman's determined refusal to cross the threshold worked in her favor. Some cells still lived in the woman's body; the seat of her soul could be restored yet.

 

Grimly Maaije set her magic to battle the forces of decay and entropy and slowly, tissue by tissue, cell by cell, molecule by molecule, her magic won. Blood flowed again to nourish the new flesh that grew to seal wounds, brain cells woke and welcomed back the consciousness that had so recently vacated them and been so reluctant to stray further, and lungs that were once again whole drew a shuddering breath as the woman's eyes snapped open.

 

Her magic spent she collapsed in the surf, exhausted. Beside her the woman she had revived rolled over coughing, then pulled a knife from her waistband and pointed it at Maaije.

 

"Where's...Ward?" she gasped.

 

Too tired to care anymore Maaije just laughed, slightly hysterically. "Nice to see you again too Agent Hand."


End file.
